Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Now he just grabs her behind and tickles her and slides his hands inside the waist of her jeans. It’s more playful than passionate and that’s okay. She jiggles the key inside the old lock and Perry leans against her, rests his head against her back.

“The Counselor’s a lightweight,” she says, opening the door.

“The Counselor is getting old,” he says, following her in and locking up behind them.

Sylvia turns on the kitchen light and shrugs out of her blazer. Perry pulls off his tie and unfastens the top button of his shirt, looks at the stack of catalogs on the counter and asks, “Anything come in the mail?”

“Junk,” she says, going to the refrigerator for some ice water. They’re both going to want aspirin before bed, so she pours a full glass. She closes the door and turns around, leans against it and looks at him as he browses the new offerings from the book club. His eyes look heavy.

“You done good, partner,” she says.

He looks up from the mail, still hunched over the counter, leaning on his elbows.

“Partner in the corporate sense or the romantic one?”

“Both,” she says, extending the water to him. Then she adds, “Which one buys me the camera?”

He laughs, thinks and says, “The lover buys you the camera.” He comes upright and puts his hands on the small of his back and arches backward. Sylvia actually hears a cracking sound.

“But the attorney pays for it,” he says.

* * *

In ten minutes, Perry falls into one of his heavy-breathing wine-comas. Sylvia knows that when she makes the bed in the morning he’ll have drooled on the pillowcase.

The wine seems to be having the opposite effect on her lately. They’ve started buying it by the caseload, direct delivery by an import company out of Boston. Perry’s delighted and kind of proud of the enormous discount they’re getting. But having that much wine in the house all the time encourages you to kill a bottle with every dinner. For a while there they were crazy for these heavy reds and then, somehow, Sylvia got the idea that red wine can lead to edginess and paranoia. She dipped into a couple of reference books to back herself up, but couldn’t find this theory confirmed in print. Once it was in her head, though, it was as good as true, so their next purchase was twelve bottles of a four-year-old French Chardonnay. She fell in love and Perry called the importer and loaded in three more cases.

They’ve made this small makeshift storage rack down in the cellar, around the corner from where Sylvia has set up the darkroom. With two of her favorite pastimes situated there, the basement has become a dank retreat for her. She’s drawn to it more and more often. She’s not content on the couch in the living room anymore, labeling Polaroids while Perry dozes on the couch with the television tuned to a sports network. She finds herself thinking Why am I listening to the sound of kickboxing from Reno, Nevada, when I could be playing with the enlarger, sipping a glass of ’88 white burgundy.

She doesn’t want to give the impression of dissatisfaction. Perry has pulled her life together for her. They’ve known each other almost three years now, lived together for over a year, and before Perry there was no direction. After her mother died, Sylvia quit her job at the front desk of the Baron. She’d had one night too many of taking smut from the mouths of fifty-year-old bellhops. She moved into her mother’s apartment, closed the drapes and became a kind of secular nun in the religion of grief and confusion.

Her father had died when her mother was seven months pregnant with Sylvia. Ma had never had a lot of money, but what she left behind was burned through by the end of that year. Because she couldn’t bring herself to move any belongings out of her old apartment, Sylvia paid rent and utilities on both places. From June through Christmas, she stayed on Ma’s couch, like she was in grammar school again and had come down with the flu and was watching old I Love Lucy reruns on the TV and Ma would be bringing in a tray of toast and tea before the next commercial.

She read a couple of the paperbacks she’d found jammed in the drum table by the front window, big fat novels that usually chronicled some family of immigrants who toughed it out through unbearable hardships to make good in America. But mostly she watched dozens of old forties movies on some all-night cable channel. After a while they all seemed to star Rita Hayworth.

While she was growing up, Sylvia and her mother shared a consuming passion for movies. It never felt as if her mother had actively instilled this love in any way. It was more like she’d passed on a rare gene, that Sylvia picked up the obsession in utero, came into the world already addicted to film. When she recalls the nights of her childhood, she thinks of sitting in her mother’s lap, in an overstuffed easy chair, both of them staring at the blue-white beam from the RCA watching Tales of Manhattan or You’ll Never Get Rich. As she entered adolescense, Sylvia’s devotion increased like a religious vocation or an eating disorder. And her mother encouraged the calling. They went to every new release that opened, then came home and pushed the TV into the bedroom and fell asleep watching the classics.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that when her mother died Sylvia’s life boiled down to watching old films and sleeping. She slept about fourteen hours a day. Always in her clothes. And always on the couch.

Twice a week, she’d force herself outside for food and supplies. She’d walk down to the corner at two in the morning and buy everything at the all-night convenience store. She didn’t care that she was paying double the price for things she could have gotten six hours later at the supermarket. She considered the cost part of the deal, the charge for the privilege of shopping while everyone else was alseep.

When Perry first heard the story of her life as a hermit, his immediate response was, “Didn’t anyone come looking for you? No friends? No relatives?”

He had a hard time believing that the answer was simply “No.” Sylvia knew nothing about her father’s family or even if there was one. Her mother had one older brother who’d died in the Korean War. Sylvia had gone to college out in the western part of the state and hadn’t kept in touch with any childhood friends she might have had.

She remembers Perry shaking his head as she told him this. His reaction got her slightly angry. She said, “These are the facts. I’m not making this up. People have lives like this.”

The day after Christmas, as she sat on the couch and opened the checkbook to pay some bills, she realized she had no money. She closed the checkbook and stood up, and pushed it in under one of the sofa cushions. Then she put on Ma’s winter coat and went outside and started to walk. She wasn’t used to the sun and with the glare off the snow, she was half-blind for the first block. The freezing air was kind of painful going into her lungs and yet she didn’t want to go back inside. She wanted just to keep moving, to keep her legs in motion. She didn’t care about direction or destination. She just wanted to be walking and breathing. She didn’t want to think beyond those two actions.

About three miles from Ma’s apartment was a small shopping plaza, an old fifties kind of thing, a strip of a dozen linked stores all housed in a large one-story rectangle of a structure with a flat roof and dingy metal canopy that hung out over the sidewalk. There was a five-and-ten and a drug store, a liquor store, a soft-serve ice cream shop, and a shoe repair place. More than half the shops were empty and the plate glass windows were whited out with what looked like soap. Sylvia stood and stared at the soaped windows and wondered why they did that. Didn’t that just call attention to the demise of the business and contribute to the seedy feeling of the place in general? It drove her kind of crazy that she couldn’t come up with a single decent reason for whitewashing the window of an empty storefront.